Invincible, Walking Dead writer trades us comics for Mario

It's a hard job to launch a single successful comic book series, but right now Robert Kirkman writes two of the best—not to mention most popular—series in comics at the moment: Walking Dead and Invincible. He is also a man who collected every star in the first Super Mario Galaxy, and he had a serious need to play the second game. Unfortunately, no stores in Lexington, Kentucky were offering the game at midnight the day before launch, and Mr. Kirkman expressed his frustration on Twitter.

Luckily for him, there is a game reviewer who happens to live in Cincinnati Ohio who had a copy of the game. I made him a deal: if he would meet me halfway and sign my copy of Walking Dead Vol. 1, the game was his.

It wasn't quite that easy

He told me via Twitter that his wife wasn't going for that deal, so I upped the ante. If he would hook us up with something cool and signed, I would drop the game off at his door. Is it ethical to use a review copy to try to finagle a meeting with your favorite writer in comics? Probably not. But why let that stop you?

He agreed on the condition that I not be a crazy person who would kill him. Fair enough. I put his office in my GPS, grabbed a friend and some coffee, and began the 90 minute drive. Who knew that the creator of some of the best comics on the market lived so close?

We arrived, and in true Craigslist drug-deal fashion I showed that I did in fact have the game. After being let into the office to make the exchange, we were shown a table full of Image Comics, and told to grab whatever looked good while Mr. Kirkman ran to get us some very special things to give away.

The Complete Invincible Vol. 2, and it's signed by Robert Kirkman and Cory Walker

"These aren't sealed, because some of these are the books from my bookshelf," he told me, showing off a set of the Walking Dead hardcovers, all five, that he then signed. These are the books he pulls down for reference when writing new issues. Knowing that this set was from Kirkman's own collection made it even cooler. If that wasn't enough, we were given the Complete Invincible Library, Volume 2, which he also signed. The gentleman he brought with him for muscle in case we ended up being psychos? A certain Cory Walker, the co-creator of Invincible. We soon put a pen in his hand as well.

Robert Kirkman is an incredibly gracious man in person, and we chatted about comics while I very jealously eyeballed the Voltron toys in the corner, which he didn't offer to sign and give to us. We talked about Walking Dead for a while, and I told him that after a particularly long reading session and a few character deaths, I decided to read Cormac McCarthy's The Road to cheer myself up. He laughed, and I told him the comic was hard to read sometimes, due to the bleak tone. "It's hard to write sometimes!" he said, nodding.

Right after we left, he tweeted a picture of the game with a single word: "Success!" This is a man who seems to delight in putting his characters through hellish circumstances—maybe it takes the newest game in Nintendo's most popular franchise to cheer him up.

We drove home, and the newly signed books were given a prominent place in my comic collection. It's a very temporary home, however, as these will be given away during the 2010 Child's Play drive. We'd like to thank Robert Kirkman for being such a nice guy, and for giving us such great comics to give away to our readers.

Walking Dead in hardcover, one through five, all signed.

If you're interested in a dark-as-hell story about the end of the world, go to your local comic store and pick up a few issues of Walking Dead, which is also being made into a television series for AMC. Invincible is likewise a story that begins like every superhero story you've ever read, and quickly flies off its rails to tell a great story with many, many dark turns. If you're interested in winning either set, and maybe a few more surprises we didn't list here, get ready to donate to Chld's Play this year!

Wait, so the guy who writes The Walking Dead had to ask his wife if he could drive 45 minutes to exchange an autograph for a video game? Not only is that lame, and lamer still that she denied him, but I can't believe he even asked.